Abortion, and a woman's right to obtain it legally and safely regardless of her reasons, is an issue that I feel very, very strongly about. Yes, it is a difficult subject, and a difficult decision, but one that needs to be the mother's, not the state's or the church's.
A recent New York Times article, however, has put my belief to the test. In this piece, writer Sam Roberts explore the practice of baby sex selection and the preference of baby boys to baby girls in Indian-, Chinese- and Korean-American families. According to a study published last year (cited by Roberts),
"In general, more boys than girls are born in the United States, by a ratio of 1.05 to 1. But among American families of Chinese, Korean and Indian descent, the likelihood of having a boy increased to 1.17 to 1 if the first child was a girl, according to the Columbia economists. If the first two children were girls, the ratio for a third child was 1.51 to 1 — or about 50 percent greater — in favor of boys."These figures are, according to Roberts, a result of families employing various sex selection methods including "in vitro fertilization, sperm sorting and abortion." The preference for boys is, undeniably, a cultural phenomenon: The posterity of the family line (passed through the male side) is one of the main reasons for such a skewered preference. As one Chinese-American professional woman recounts in her interview,
“Early on, after the two girls were born and another two years went by and there was not a third, I found myself in the living room with four or five older relatives in a discussion of ‘Wouldn’t it be lovely for you to have a boy?’ It’s extremely uncomfortable.”The article touches on two big issues for me: 1) how much should "cultural" practices and beliefs be tolerated when they conflict with the modern, liberal, democratic values (for example, the idea of fundamental, universal human rights) upon which our legal and political values are universally based? and 2) Should selective practices such as these be protected as a legal choice?
This practice, I'm sure, is excellent fodder for the anti-choice, anti-abortion camp (I refuse to use that misleading term pro-life in the same way that I refuse to use states-rights as a euphemism for right-to-own-slaves in the on going debate about the causes of the American Civil War, but I digress). Another slippery slope argument could easily be - and already has been - fashioned out of the issue: If we make abortions completely legal and readily accessible (which it is, to a certain extent), then we leave the door wide open - complete with a smiling doorman and a plush red carpet - for "unnecessary" selective abortions such as these.
But it's worth looking at the alternative here: Would allowing - or rather, forcing - a baby girl to be born to a family that does not want her really be a better option? While some argue that parents would grow to love their child regardless, why should we make a child grow up with such a chip on her shoulder? In addition, a reverse slippery slope situation could also be argued: If we were to set such restrictions on what is "necessary" and what isn't, then the circle could be redrawn and made narrower and narrower. As many anti-abortion activists argue, a danger to the mother's "mental health" does not count as a "real" medical threat, and therefore provides no sufficient ground for an abortion (I'm calling shenanigans on that one). Agreeing to limit when a woman can get an abortion, while seeming a sensible compromise today, could seriously - to crassly put it - come back to bite us in the ass. Such a decision would allow room for society, doctors, the government and PEOPLE WHO DO NOT OWN THE UTERUS IN QUESTION in general to pass judgment on and dictate what a woman can do with her own uterus and its contents.
This is why I consider myself pro-choice: I believe that it is the government's duty to protect a woman's fundamental human right to make informed, independent decisions regarding her body and her health (including mental and reproductive health), regardless of what decision she ends up making. This latter part is nobody's business, the former, everybody's.
As for issue number 1, well, just because something has been accepted as standard practice for generations does not make it right. It used to be accepted that women should remain inside the home, and that different races were inherently unequal. I think it is necessary that each generation should reevaluate the accepted values and ideas of their parents, not just adopt them wholesale because it has "always been that way." If the latter were the case, democracy, to us, would still mean old, rich dudes voting. Culture is a living thing, and must continually evolve and change. This is how progress is made.
